Fantômas: Le Faux Magistrat

British guitarist James Blackshaw's latest release is a seamless 74-minute piece stemmed from a commission for a live score for the 1914 silent movie Le Faux Magistrat. It's his most audacious attempt yet to shatter his previously established mold as a radiant guitar-wielding instrumentalist.

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"Fantomas : Le Faux Magistrat (Part 9)"

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James Blackshaw

If you’re hoping to be a musician hidebound to a set of stylistic suppositions meant to guide your entire career, consider making your debut with an album full of acoustic guitar music. Whether it’s due to a lack of differentiating reference points (every young guitarist, mind you, recalls John Fahey) or the isolating nature of the enterprise itself, emerging guitarists often seem conscripted into that role forever. Fahey rarely gets mentioned for his fascinating musiqué concrete experiments, or Sandy Bull for his work with electronics and exotica. Is it any wonder that Rainy Day Raga—the Peter Walker album without flute, violin, and sarod—remains the only one listeners really know?As a sideman for Lambchop and Silver Jews and the head of an excellent reissue label, William Tyler has had a career as varied as his albums, which have moved increasingly at liberty between lithe electrics, plaintive acoustics, and beguiling electronics. His latest EP is a three-song rock stomp, but the handle of “acoustic guitarist,” the heritage of his earliest works, will likely remain his yoke for years to come.

During the last five years, the British guitarist James Blackshaw has attempted to move beyond the restrictive reputation he gained during the first half of his career. On his early albums for Tompkins Square and Young God, Blackshaw blossomed from a majestic player into a stunning arranger, able to link his 12-string fantasies with backlit accompaniment that, though spare, doubled the guitar’s emotional payload. And on more recent works, he’s increased his time on the piano and the nylon-stringed guitar. He wrote exclusively for those instruments onLove is The Plan, The Plan is Death from 2012, an album that even included an oblong torch song with saturnine vocals from heavy metal singer Geneviève Beaulieu. Last year, he issued The Watchers, a beautiful collection of improvisations with Lubomyr Melnyk, the Ukrainian pianist who shares with Blackshaw a love of ornate, uninterrupted audio. Blackshaw’s new music is the sound of someone actively pressing against the boundaries of expectation.

Fantômas: Le Faux Magistrat is Blackshaw’s most audacious attempt yet to shatter that mold. Recorded live in Paris last Halloween, the seamless 74-minute piece stemmed from a commission for a live score for the 1914 silent movie Le Faux Magistrat. The fifth film in a series of classics by Louis Feuillade, Le Faux Magistrat ended a centennial celebration of the director at the prestigious Théâtre de Châtelet. Preceded by the likes of Tim Hecker and Yann Tiersen, Blackshaw was tasked with providing accompaniment to the screening. Rather than write a long and loping guitar piece, though, Blackshaw took it as an invitation to exercise his unrest. He recruited a quartet to work through a set of a dozen interconnected movements, surprisingly filled with dissonant electronics and consonant strings, dynamic percussion and versatile saxophone. Blackshaw leads with piano, nylon-stringed guitar and an electric, but he often yields the foreground to the group, slipping into the mix like a composer watching from the wings as an ensemble goes to work.

And the players he assembled are a stunning mix, capable of animating his search for inspiration in soft jazz and classical minimalism, electroacoustic luminescence and sweeping post-rock, without pause. Duane Pitre and Charlotte Glasson—American and British experimental multi-instrumentalists, respectively—serve as the utility players here, accenting the music’s range. Pitre moves between electric guitar harmonics and subdural drones, while Glasson adds bold saxophone and sweeping strings, sometimes within the span of a single minute. Slowdive’s Simon Scott shifts between light, almost incidental percussion and thundering drums. Indeed, their most powerful moment as a group comes at one of Blackshaw’s most surprising turns as a composer. While he plays what could pass for a sample of “A Love Supreme” on piano, Scott and Pitre, now on bass and synthesizer, form a punishing, doom-like rhythm section. Glasson laces the load with vibraphone whorls and saxophone sighs. She is the bait, balanced at the lip of the trap.

The condition that gives moments like this their intrigue—that is, Blackshaw is actively working to outstrip his past—is also the source of Fantômas’ overall error. Blackshaw and his band return to a handful of themes and textures, such as the piano ostinato that serves as a bridge between several pieces. But it all seems a touch desultory, too, as though Blackshaw’s suddenly large toolkit tempted him to build too much too soon. Parts evolve with force, not finesse, and many moments seem undeserved and undeveloped, as when electronic washes empty into the mix like a transitional crutch.

In the past, Blackshaw’s music seemed to reveal cathedrals of wonder and mystery, a quality that made it worth revisiting. But much of Fantômas seems plain and pat, the sort of structures one might make while learning the basics of a trade. Many of the piano lines here mirror Blackshaw’s guitar work, but they’re less powerful and wooing in their new, almost hesitant voice. And at worst, the nylon-string bits can feel like outright pap, cheap filler in a broad and ornate scheme. During the piece’s grand moment of high-rising action, for instance, Blackshaw takes what sounds like Europe’s “The Final Countdown” for a lap of soft-rock shuffle. Intentional or not, it’s a hilarious distraction from the music’s pensive mood, a break in the reverie that feels every bit like a growing pain.

Fantômas is certainly a pleasant listen, perhaps a bit jumbled for any immersion but varied and arching enough to soundtrack household chores. Still, its most notable accomplishment is that it should emancipate Blackshaw, once and for all, from his 12-string-guitarist cloister, or from the prevailing if obsolete notion that he does only one thing. Ideas abound during Fantômas, even if the execution is lacking. That’s a happy reversal from Blackshaw’s previously pristine output—an auspicious sign for the future, even if necessitates a rather forgettable present.